This is the story of Dr. Ben Carson. A black man raised by a single mother in difficult circumstances, Carson went on to be a world renowned neurosurgeon and the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
There are so many obstacles that Carson had to overcome, not the least of which was racial discrimination, that there is just too much to cover in one ninety minute movie. We rush through Carson's being labeled as the dumbest kid in the class, to his sudden rise as one of the smartest, then on to Yale, marriage, his internship, and his ultimate successes as a neurosurgeon. There is enough material in any one of those phases in his life for a full length feature.
How Carson got from being the at the bottom of his class to brilliant would have been most interesting, but we are asked simply to accept that it happened because his mother limited his TV viewing and asked him to read books. We are given no detail on how Carson developed his appreciation of classical music at a young age. There is minimal background on his wife, except for a brief scene hinting that she is a musician. How Carson met his future wife and how that relationship evolved would have been interesting. His mother's depression is treated in a most cursory manner: she is not depressed, she is depressed, she has a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital, she is not depressed. We get almost no information about Carson's experiences in medical school. For most of this movie we could have gotten as much by simply having read a brief biography.
Gooding is fine as Dr. Carson, as is Kimberly Elise as his mother. The kids who play Carson as a youth are not so good--they come across as reading from a script. The filming is less than inventive. In one scene Carson says he feels like a faucet that has run dry and the image of a slowly dripping faucet is shown.
A lot of the scenes don't ring true and I was left wondering if anything even remotely close to them ever occurred in real life. The attempted stabbing seemed particularly hard to believe. When Carson was given a scholastic award in junior high, a teacher kept him on stage after the award while she berated the white kids in the class for not performing as well as a fatherless black kid, saying that they should be ashamed of themselves. I don't know, but that seemed over the top in a Michigan public school, even for the early 1960s. Carson's mother got a job as the maid for a professor who had thousands of books in his library and he winds up trying to teach her to read? Not likely. And so on.
The swelling music frequently alerts us as to when we should be inspired.
The message of "you can be anything you want to be" is a theme. But, not everyone can be a neurosurgeon. For example, Carson was endowed with a strong sense of three dimensional perception as well as having the required highly developed hand-eye coordination. And he has the stamina and mental disposition to handle the rigors of the job. In some ways these inspiring movies can backfire, since achievement at the level of a Dr. Carson is reserved for only a few and comparing oneself with someone like him can be discouraging.
The final surgery scene, where Carson separates the Rausch twins who were born joined at the head, is exceedingly realistic. There is only a limited time that Carson has to perform this operation and the scene is played like one of those "you have an hour to save the world" dramas, complete with a clock counting down the minutes. And we know the operation will be successful, otherwise why would so much screen time be devoted to it?
The story of Dr. Carson and his extraordinary achievements deserves a more complete and compelling telling than what is given in this movie. A similar story, that of Vivien Thomas, a black man who rose from being a janitor to being a surgeon (also at Johns Hopkins coincidentally), is told in the much more engrossing, "Something the Lord Made."
There are so many obstacles that Carson had to overcome, not the least of which was racial discrimination, that there is just too much to cover in one ninety minute movie. We rush through Carson's being labeled as the dumbest kid in the class, to his sudden rise as one of the smartest, then on to Yale, marriage, his internship, and his ultimate successes as a neurosurgeon. There is enough material in any one of those phases in his life for a full length feature.
How Carson got from being the at the bottom of his class to brilliant would have been most interesting, but we are asked simply to accept that it happened because his mother limited his TV viewing and asked him to read books. We are given no detail on how Carson developed his appreciation of classical music at a young age. There is minimal background on his wife, except for a brief scene hinting that she is a musician. How Carson met his future wife and how that relationship evolved would have been interesting. His mother's depression is treated in a most cursory manner: she is not depressed, she is depressed, she has a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital, she is not depressed. We get almost no information about Carson's experiences in medical school. For most of this movie we could have gotten as much by simply having read a brief biography.
Gooding is fine as Dr. Carson, as is Kimberly Elise as his mother. The kids who play Carson as a youth are not so good--they come across as reading from a script. The filming is less than inventive. In one scene Carson says he feels like a faucet that has run dry and the image of a slowly dripping faucet is shown.
A lot of the scenes don't ring true and I was left wondering if anything even remotely close to them ever occurred in real life. The attempted stabbing seemed particularly hard to believe. When Carson was given a scholastic award in junior high, a teacher kept him on stage after the award while she berated the white kids in the class for not performing as well as a fatherless black kid, saying that they should be ashamed of themselves. I don't know, but that seemed over the top in a Michigan public school, even for the early 1960s. Carson's mother got a job as the maid for a professor who had thousands of books in his library and he winds up trying to teach her to read? Not likely. And so on.
The swelling music frequently alerts us as to when we should be inspired.
The message of "you can be anything you want to be" is a theme. But, not everyone can be a neurosurgeon. For example, Carson was endowed with a strong sense of three dimensional perception as well as having the required highly developed hand-eye coordination. And he has the stamina and mental disposition to handle the rigors of the job. In some ways these inspiring movies can backfire, since achievement at the level of a Dr. Carson is reserved for only a few and comparing oneself with someone like him can be discouraging.
The final surgery scene, where Carson separates the Rausch twins who were born joined at the head, is exceedingly realistic. There is only a limited time that Carson has to perform this operation and the scene is played like one of those "you have an hour to save the world" dramas, complete with a clock counting down the minutes. And we know the operation will be successful, otherwise why would so much screen time be devoted to it?
The story of Dr. Carson and his extraordinary achievements deserves a more complete and compelling telling than what is given in this movie. A similar story, that of Vivien Thomas, a black man who rose from being a janitor to being a surgeon (also at Johns Hopkins coincidentally), is told in the much more engrossing, "Something the Lord Made."